As a nationwide housing shortage keeps affordable options scarce, an old idea is getting a new look.
Housing advocates and several cities and counties are championing what has recently started to be called “social housing:” residences built and managed by the government, or public housing.
Private developers have the hardest time building the units that are most affordable to tenants, said Iziah Thompson, a senior policy analyst with Community Service Society of New York. Social housing aims to leverage the public purse to “create a stock of affordable housing that otherwise the market would have a difficult time creating,” he said.
It’s a worthy goal – but advocates like Thompson are well aware that public housing's history, which is plagued by everything from violence to vermin to government corruption, makes for a hard sell.
“Public housing went awry when it started being very segregated,” he told USA TODAY. “After that I think the idea took hold that government can only build for low-income people, and that created a sort of dependency on subsidies which then dried up at the federal level.”
